[CentOS] How to make nodes in my local LAN see each other's names

[Timothy Madden]

On 30.11.2011 17:39, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 7:54 AM, Timothy Madden<terminatorul at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>> Thank you all for your answers.
>>
>> Indeed, my router (D-Link DIR-100) only does DNS relay and nothing more.
>
> Errr, unless I'm looking at the wrong online manual, DNS relay does
> _exactly_ what you want.  You just have to give it a local domain name
> and fill in the dhcp reservation table with the related name/ip/mac
> sets.  The fact that it wants a name in this table should have been a
> hint.
>
> After you've set that up, test it with 'dig @192.168.0.1 name.localdomain'.

Well ... yes, you are right, the router has that reservation table in 
its DHCP settings. But if I have to include *all* my machines on the 
DHCP reservations list, with hostname, IP address and MAC address, than 
it is not really dynamic configuration, it is all manual and static again.

I still think CIFS is the way to do the job right. With it you just add 
a new machine into the switch or router, make sure it has CIFS (and has 
the name service switch configured to use it), and everything works.

Sorry if my opinion looks too ignorant, I do appreciate your answers.
Compared to other newsgroups, this list is very helpful (and Gmane rocks!).

Maybe I got used too much to the way this thing "just works" on a 
Windows network. But I really expected a modern Linux OS to have some 
better decentralized name resolving support off-the-box for a small, 
router-based home network. I still think the wins support is there, only 
it is not started by default and as I can now see, it is also too 
difficult for me to set up.

DIR-100 is not Gigabit, but 7 of the 8 machines that use it are all 
connected in a gigabit switch (D-Link DGS-1008D), so (most of) the 
subnet is internally gigabit. There was no port left in the switch for 
machine no. 8, so that goes into the DIR-100 directly (as does the 
switch) and is going to 100M. :)

Thank you,
Timothy Madden